Here is a purely hypothetical situation: A man is running to catch a train that’s leaving a station. He leaps aboard, managing to make it onto the train, but it looks as though he might lose his balance. But as the train chugs past the end of the platform, a railroad employee standing there gives him a shove to help him retain his balance.
The leaping man is holding a package about fifteen inches long. The package holds fireworks, but no one would have known that based on its appearance. Because of the “friendly shove,” the man drops this package and, when it falls, it explodes violently.
Now based just on this, who would sue whom for what? The railroad sues the man because he brought explosives onto its premises? The man sues the railroad because now he has to buy more fireworks? The guard sues the man because he was injured by the exploding package?
Well, silly you if you thought of any of those things. Because the person who brought suit was a woman named Helen Palsgraf who was standing nearly sixty feet away at the other end of the station. She was waiting for another train, and the violent explosion rocked the entire platform, causing some scales to fall down and injure her. And, quite logically, she sued . . . the railroad.
Lawyers have gotten lots of bad publicity in recent years over things like the woman who got $2 million from McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee in her lap (a bad distortion of what actually happened in that case, anyway). But the creativity of lawyers in arguing who is liable to whom for what has been around a lot longer than that — because Mrs. Palsgraf’s case happened more than a century ago, in New York in August, 1924. It has become the most celebrated personal injury case of all time — the one case every law student has to grapple with to try to understand when someone has a right to recover damages from someone else.
Mrs. Palsgraf was injured in August, 1924. She won her case against the railroad in the trial court, and her case was affirmed on appeal. But the railroad appealed, and in 1928 it reached New York’s highest court, where the Chief Judge was a fellow named Benjamin Cardozo. Cardozo’s florid writing style, so it was said, would have gotten him the job of writing the Bible if it were still available.
Cardozo wrote the majority opinion reversing the judgment against the railroad, concluding that it and its employee had done nothing wrong because they had no duty to use due care toward Mrs. Palsgraf. As Cardozo stated, “The conduct of the [railroad employee], if a wrong in its relation to the holder of the package, was not a wrong in relation to [Mrs. Palsgraf], standing far away.” He concluded an injury to her was “unforeseeable” to someone in the employee’s position, and therefore, whether she was injured or not, she legally could not recover damages from the railroad.
Cardozo included a phrase that has become famous in personal injury cases: “The risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed.” In effect, no matter how straight the line that ran from the guard’s act of shoving the man to Mrs. Palsgraf’s injury, if that line was long enough, she was out of luck.
Her case is also famous, however for the dissenting opinion of Justice Andrews, which two other justices joined. According to Andrews, Mrs. Palsgraf was indeed a foreseeable victim of the exploding package. How did he know? Because she was injured! In his view, so long as someone was injured, they should be compensated if another person caused the injury through a careless act. Or, to put it another way, no matter how long the road, if it was straight, then the injured person should recover.
This debate will probably go on as long as there is a legal system, because neither side has the better argument. Justice Andrews would say that Mrs. Palsgraf was injured through no fault of her own. But then — she wasn’t really injured through the railroad’s fault, either. The person never mentioned in the case is the fellow who dropped the exploding package. His identity was never learned, and it’s likely that, even if he had been identified, he probably didn’t have the money to make a lawsuit worthwhile.
That’s why Mrs. Palsgraf sued the railroad in the first place: it had deeper pockets. And so, despite the passage of more than a century . . . the more the change, the more they stay the same.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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